84 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



with the result that that group emerges from his hands in a 

 new and scintillating garb of comparative finality. He has 

 collected all its specimens in his vicinity and perhaps 

 elsewhere, worked them systematically and published a mono- 

 graph ; the result will be of infinite value, and the infinity of 

 the value will be in direct ratio to the man's ability. Forty 

 years ago not a dozen people in England knew a Mycetophilid 

 when they saw it ; now there are a fair number of Dipterists, 

 and they all know it ; there are quite a lot of general entomo- 

 logists, and they, for the most part, know it in a vague way ; 

 I myself know it much in the way that I know a glacial man's 

 skull from that of a cave tiger. 



Nothing more exact is claimed for me, and I owe the names 

 of all my recent captures in this delightful family of fungus- 

 gnats to Mr. F. W. Edwards, who has been so good as to look 

 them through and tell me what they are. Without names, 

 natural objects appeal to nothing but our aesthetic taste ; with 

 them, the world of their habits, economy, differentiation and 

 utility is at once thrown wide. This door Mr. Edwards has 

 opened and I propose to see what is beyond it, and thence, all 

 ignorant of literature upon the subject, to bring something 

 new in the way of distribution and methods of collecting these 

 beauteous little flies. That they do feed in fungi I suppose 

 one must take for granted as known since De Geer's time ; yet 

 it seems curious that I, who may claim a pretty messy 

 experience with Boleti and Agarics through a decade of beetle- 

 collecting, have never had the^ least experience of the fact. 

 Nor have I yet succeeded in discovering the imagines' modus 

 Vivendi: the most prolific hunting-ground seems to be the 

 windows of one's own bouse, if it be a country one ; and the 

 second best to be the luscious flower-tables of umbelliferous 

 plants near woods. 



The most satisfactory point about the Mycetophilid study 

 is the limited number of British species : no more than 150 were 

 known to occur here with any degree of certainty in 1900, and 

 during the last score of years this number, though naturally 

 augmented by later investigation, has not increased to an 

 alarming extent. This is doubtless due to the fact that most 

 of the species are of such size and so brightly coloured that 

 they attracted the attention of Curtis and our early entomologists, 

 who duly placed upon record those that were then described. 



Of the first subfamily, the Sciarinse, little can be said here 

 because its members are the smallest, dullest and most 

 inconspicuous of the whole group. Sciara Thomas, a black gnat 

 with black wings, is very common upon all kinds of flowers ; 

 it is an autumn species, and I have found it from July 7th, 

 1897, to September 25th all over Suffolk and throughout the 

 New Forest ; it seems ubiquitous and frequently occurs in 



